The Political Quarterly, 2009 Lecture: Doing Politics Differently

A discussion of how politics is done in Britain, and how it could be done differently. It explores the relationship between culture and structure in politics, and between strong government and effective accountability. The argument is that the concentration on structures can lead to a neglect of the importance of political culture. It suggests that there are three democratic levels, and that Britain does better on one than on the others; and identifies a range of democratic issues to be tackled. It concludes by suggesting that even without major instrumental changes there are cultural changes that would make a difference to how politics is done in Britain.     

LOCAL INQUIRIES OR PUBLIC HEARINGS: CHANGES IN PUBLIC CONSULTATION OVER THE REDISTRIBUTION OF UK PARLIAMENTARY CONSTITUENCY BOUNDARIES

The UK government undertakes a variety of public consultation procedures during the implementation of a range of policies, some of which involve public hearings with varying formats. In 2011 it proposed a major change to such procedures used in the redistribution of Parliamentary constituency boundaries. Local Inquiries were deemed ‘not fit for purpose’ and eliminated, because they were lengthy and dominated by the political parties seeking electoral gain. This change was opposed in Parliament and an alternative procedure introduced involving Public Hearings which were to be shorter and less conflictual than the Local Inquiries they replaced. The Hearings for the first round of redistributions under the new procedure have now been held. This article assesses whether they were any ‘fitter for purpose’; there was very little participation by the general public and, as before, the proceedings were dominated by the political parties.     

Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: The North Carolina Approach

Some local governments face fiscal challenges due to mismanagement and declining economies. In particular, manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio have been hard hit by the effects of international competition. To prevent fiscal distress from becoming a crisis, states exercise oversight over local government fiscal management. The three bond rating agencies consider the North Carolina oversight system a model. This paper discusses the North Carolina oversight system, including audit review, technical assistance, debt issuance, and power to take over the financial operations of distressed local units.     

Current Criminal Justice Projects Here and Abroad

The present survey is based mainly, as far as the United States is concerned, on the files of the Smithsonian Science Information Exchange (SSIE), from whom we received—with the financial support of the University of Central Florida—the most recent five hundred or so project reports in the field of criminal and juvenile justice and related areas, including crime-related drug and alcohol abuse projects. As to foreign projects, only a few are listed with SSIE; most of the following information is the result of an admittedly incomplete inquiry among organizations, research institutes, and universities abroad. May we say here that we received excellent cooperation from them which we greatly appreciated. Space being limited, we can describe in the following article only a few of the some one-thousand projects we examined.     

‘It’s a Limited Kind of Happiness': Barriers to Achieving Human Well‐being among Peruvian Migrants in London and Madrid

This article examines migrants' self‐reported experiences via application of human well‐being approaches to deepen exploration of the barriers that migrants themselves identify in achieving their goals and getting their needs met. A focus on the construction of human well‐being can potentially provide a more holistic approach to debates on international migration. Discussions have focused on labour market integration, paying less emphasis to migrants as social agents and the psychosocial elements that they consider important for achieving human well‐being. This article applies human well‐being approaches to assess the barriers that Peruvian migrants identify in the contexts of London and Madrid.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.     

DEMONSTRATING THE VALIDITY OF TWIN RESEARCH IN CRIMINOLOGY

In a recent article published in Criminology, Burt and Simons ( 2014 ) claimed that the statistical violations of the classical twin design render heritability studies useless. Claiming quantitative genetics is “fatally flawed” and describing the results generated from these models as “preposterous,” Burt and Simons took the unprecedented step to call for abandoning heritability studies and their constituent findings. We show that their call for an “end to heritability studies” was premature, misleading, and entirely without merit. Specifically, we trace the history of behavioral genetics and show that 1) the Burt and Simons critique dates back 40 years and has been subject to a broad array of empirical investigations, 2) the violation of assumptions in twin models does not invalidate their results, and 3) Burt and Simons created a distorted and highly misleading portrait of behavioral genetics and those who use quantitative genetic approaches.